The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund Read online

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  To my loving parents

  for making their journey

  Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,

  Dawn on our darkness and lend us Thine aid.

  —Opening line from an epiphany hymn

  by the Right Reverend Reginald Heber,

  Anglican bishop of Calcutta, 1823–1826

  Cast of Characters

  In September 2009, as Wall Street recovered from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, an insider trading case was brewing…

  The Leading Actors

  The Guptas

  Rajat K. Gupta—former three-time head of McKinsey and board member for Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, and AMR

  Anita Mattoo Gupta—his wife

  Geetanjali, Megha, Aditi, and Deepali Gupta—his daughters

  Ashwini and Pran Kumari Gupta—his parents

  Kanchan Gupta—his younger brother

  Jayashree Chowdhury—his younger sister

  His Lawyers

  Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel

  Gary P. Naftalis—Gupta’s lead counsel; a former federal prosecutor turned A-list criminal defense attorney who has represented everyone from former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner to Wall Street legend Kenneth Langone

  David S. Frankel—longtime litigation partner of Naftalis, who represented New York State Liberal Party leader Raymond Harding in an inquiry by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo

  Robin Wilcox

  Alan R. Friedman

  The Kumars

  Anil Kumar—McKinsey consultant who was Raj Rajaratnam’s classmate at Wharton and Gupta’s protégé at McKinsey

  Malvika Kumar—his wife

  Aman Kumar—his son

  His Lawyers

  Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Anello

  Robert G. Morvillo—Kumar’s lead counsel; he represented domestic goddess Martha Stewart

  Gregory Morvillo—his son, who after his father’s death would start his own firm and represent Level Global cofounder Anthony Chiasson

  The Rajaratnams

  Raj Rajaratnam—head of the Galleon Group

  Asha Pabla Rajaratnam—his wife

  Rengan Rajaratnam—former head of Sedna Capital and Raj’s youngest brother

  Ragakanthan Rajaratnam—Galleon portfolio manager and Raj’s middle brother

  His Lawyers

  Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld

  John M. Dowd—Rajaratnam’s lead counsel; a feisty ex-marine who also served as special counsel to three commissioners of Major League Baseball in the investigation of Pete Rose and others

  Terence J. Lynam

  Samidh Guha

  Patricia A. Millett

  The Sheriffs of Wall Street

  The Securities and Exchange Commission

  George S. Canellos—director, New York office

  David A. Markowitz—former assistant regional director, New York office

  Sanjay Wadhwa—assistant regional director, New York office

  Jason E. Friedman—senior staff attorney

  John P. Henderson—senior staff attorney

  The FBI

  B. J. Kang—special agent who was one of the arresting agents of Bernie Madoff and also worked the Galleon case

  The US Attorney’s Office, New York

  Preetinder S. Bharara—US attorney, Southern District of New York

  Reed Brodsky—assistant US attorney

  Andrew Z. Michaelson—special assistant US attorney on loan from the SEC

  Jonathan R. Streeter—assistant US attorney

  The Galleon Circle

  The Galleon Group

  Michael Cardillo—portfolio manager

  Kris Chellam—former Xilinx executive turned Galleon portfolio manager

  Caryn Eisenberg—Rajaratnam’s executive assistant

  Tom Fernandez—Rajaratnam’s Wharton classmate and head of investor relations

  Michael Fisherman—analyst

  Ian Horowitz—trader

  David Lau—Rajaratnam’s Wharton classmate and Asia chief

  George Lau—chief compliance officer

  Ananth Muniyappa—trader

  Gary Rosenbach—portfolio manager

  Richard Schutte—chief operating officer

  Leon Shaulov—portfolio manager

  Adam Smith—Harvard Business School graduate, former Morgan Stanley investment banker, and portfolio manager at Galleon

  Other Traders

  William J. Lyons III—former Sedna trader with a weakness for instant messaging

  Matt Read—Lyons’s cousin and instant-message partner

  Frank “Quint” Slattery—manager of Symmetry Peak Capital

  Around the Galleon Ring

  Sunil Bhalla—Polycom executive

  Danielle Chiesi—New Castle Funds consultant

  Rajive Dhar—executive at Arris Group

  Rajiv Goel—Wharton classmate of Raj Rajaratnam and Intel Treasury executive

  Shammara Hussain—former investor relations associate at Market Street Partners

  Roomy Khan—former Intel marketing employee and former Galleon trader

  Deep Shah—credit analyst at Moody’s Investors Service

  Apjit Walia—RBC Capital Markets analyst

  Goldman Sachs

  Lloyd C. Blankfein—chief executive

  Gary D. Cohn—president

  John H. Bryan—board member

  William W. George—board member

  Gregory K. Palm—general counsel

  Steven R. Peikin—Goldman’s outside lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell

  John F. W. Rogers—Blankfein’s chief of staff and secretary to the Goldman board

  Byron D. Trott—Warren E. Buffett’s banker

  David A. Viniar—chief financial officer

  Jon Winkelried—former president

  McKinsey

  Dominic Barton—managing director

  Marvin Bower—former managing director (1950–1967)

  D. Ronald Daniel—former managing director (1976–1988)

  Ian Davis—former managing director (2003–2009)

  Frederick W. Gluck—former managing director (1988–1994)

  Herbert Henzler—former chairman of McKinsey Germany

  David Palecek—McKinsey consultant

  Anupam “Tino” Puri—former managing director of McKinsey

  India

  Paresh Vaish—former engagement manager on Hindustan Motors project

  Donald C. Waite III—former head of McKinsey’s New York office

  Adil Zainulbhai—chairman of McKinsey India

  Harvard Business School

  Walter J. Salmon—Gupta’s professor

  John V. Carberry—Gupta’s suite mate

  David Manly—Gupta’s late friend

  Prologue

  The Twice Blessed

  It was Tuesday, November 24, 2009, and Rajat Kumar Gupta was
headed to the White House for the first state dinner hosted by President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, the most glamorous political couple since the Kennedys. Six years had passed since Gupta had stepped down as the three-term global managing director of consulting giant McKinsey & Co., but at sixty, he was busier than ever. He sat on a handful of corporate boards—Goldman Sachs & Co., Procter & Gamble Co., and American Airlines, to name a few. His wife, Anita, had hoped his retirement from the top job at McKinsey would slow him down, but he was in the throes of building his own private equity company from scratch. Jetting from continent to continent, living out of a suitcase, he was as intent on being a game changer in private equity and philanthropy as he had been during a storied career in consulting.

  Dressed in a black Nehru suit, with a red handkerchief tucked in his pocket, Gupta made his way to the white tent on the South Lawn from the gilded East Room, which served as the staging area for the dinner. At every turn, he ran into friends. He chatted with Deepak Chopra, the new age physician, who was wearing his signature gem-studded eyeglasses for the glittering gala. He mingled with Preeta Bansal, a top lawyer in the new administration, and caught up with Bobby Jindal, a former McKinsey consultant and now the Republican governor of Louisiana. Jindal, whose given name is Piyush, was born in Baton Rouge; his parents migrated to America from the Indian state of Punjab six months before he was born.

  Jindal was typical of the guests at the White House that night. While the ostensible purpose of the evening was to honor the Indian prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, the event also served as a barometer for how far and how fast an immigrant group had risen. In one generation Indian-Americans had vaulted from geeky outsiders to polished players in all facets of American society.

  If Gupta wanted to make small talk in the security line with a Fortune 500 CEO, he could approach either GE’s Jeffrey Immelt or Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, who was born and bred in Chennai. If he wanted to bask in the reflected glow of a TV presenter, he could chat with Katie Couric or the Mumbai-born Fareed Zakaria. Hollywood was represented at the event. Both Steven Spielberg and the Indian director of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan, whose birthplace is Pondicherry, were in attendance that night.

  As one of the pioneering Indian success stories in the United States, Gupta knew almost all the Indian invitees and, as a McKinsey legend, their non-Indian counterparts too. He had worked with many and served as a mentor to others. When Neal Kumar Katyal, the principal deputy solicitor general, was in high school and getting pressure from his Indian parents to study medicine, Gupta advised him to follow his dreams. Katyal’s position in the Justice Department as one of the chief attorneys representing the government before the US Supreme Court was a testament to the heights to which Indians had risen in American society.

  “As you looked around the room that night, it was breathtaking to see the diversity and depth of talent,” says Timothy J. Roemer, at the time the US ambassador to India. “There were CEOs and entrepreneurs, there were doctors, hotel owners, and writers. There were aspiring office seekers and office holders. There were people who had grown up poor in India but now they were the CEO of the company. You could feel how alive the American dream was in that room,” exults Roemer.

  Gupta and the other Indian-American luminaries were either part of or the children of a generation that academic Vijay Prashad has dubbed the “twice blessed.” The first blessing was to be born after India had achieved its independence from Great Britain at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. The blessing of this freedom was not just political; it was cultural too. The end of the Raj made educational and social advancement possible to a young nation throbbing with 340 million people.

  The second blessing was the culmination of the civil rights struggle in the United States and the passing in 1965 of the now largely overlooked Hart-Cellar Act into law. The act—an outward-looking follow-up to the 1964 Civil Rights Act—did away with long-standing isolationist policies that severely restricted Indian immigration to one hundred people each year. Hart-Cellar meant that future immigrants would be allowed into America based on their skills and not just their countries of origin, race, or ancestry. For a generation of Indians weaned on a strict diet of education, it was a momentous breakthrough with far-reaching implications.

  In the wake of the act, Indian immigration into America grew from a trickle to a torrent. Unlike the previous waves of huddled masses who took several generations to make their way from digging ditches to holding office in the statehouse, Indian immigrants were highly educated and brimming with ambition. “There is an immense, immense selectivity in the pattern of Indian migration to the United States,” says Professor Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, an expert on immigration and dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. The average Indian in the United States is “ten thousand times more likely to have a doctorate” than the average Indian in India. In other words, the Indians who come to America are by and large the country’s “brightest and best,” an observation borne out even today by hard facts.

  Of the 3.2 million Indians in the United States, 70 percent have bachelor’s degrees compared to just 28 percent nationally. Their median annual household income of $88,000 is almost twice what most Americans earn each year and 33 percent higher than the average income of Asians in the United States. Most of the overachievers are immigrants. In the new millennium, Gupta and other Indian-born natives were ubiquitous in every sphere of American life. They were among the country’s most promising doctors and engineers and its most successful bankers and lawyers. Some ran or were poised to run the nation’s biggest corporations—Citigroup and MasterCard. Others were contenders for top jobs at all-American companies like Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

  None of this would have been possible had it not been for the path staked out by the likes of Rajat Kumar Gupta. He was the most accomplished representative of an entire generation of strivers. He cleared an eight-thousand-mile path to the United States for hardworking Indian émigrés. Through his exemplary career—and without ever consciously choosing to do so—he broke down America’s prejudicial business barriers and served as a model not only for his peers but for their sons and daughters too.

  In the weeks before the White House dinner, there was much handicapping about who would be asked and whether previous guests to state dinners with Indian prime ministers would be asked again. In the bruising politics of the Beltway, the drop-offs were more widely publicized than the invitees and the absences—the most notable being Citigroup chief Vikram Pandit—talked about in hushed, funereal tones.

  There was never any question that Gupta would be invited. He was one of the few Indians in America who waltzed through vastly different worlds, business and philanthropy, in India and America, without ever losing a step. He was friends with almost all the Indian businessmen accompanying Dr. Singh on his trip to the United States. He was close to Mukesh Ambani, the head of the powerful Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, who viewed Gupta as one of India’s most treasured exports, someone who had reached the pinnacle of corporate and public life in the United States but had never lost his affection for his homeland. He knew Ratan Tata, often described as the David Rockefeller of India. Tata, whose holdings run the gamut from cars—Jaguar Land Rover—to hotels—Mumbai’s iconic Taj Mahal Palace hotel—had worked early on to help Gupta turn his dream of an Indian business school into reality.

  But Gupta’s most important relationship—one that certainly helped secure an invitation that evening—was his friendship with the guest of honor, Dr. Singh. Gupta was one of the few Indian executives in America who could get the Indian prime minister on the phone on short notice. Despite McKinsey’s prominence in India, the two were not acquainted in the early 1990s when Gupta was a rising star at McKinsey, and Singh, then a little-known finance minister in a previous Indian government, was the architect of a fusillade of economic reforms that dismantled the Red Tape Raj and ushered in an era of entrepren
eurial freedom. But when India prospered in the wake of Singh’s moves, McKinsey thrived, advising a raft of Indian companies on restructuring moves and playing a pivotal role in building “Offshore-istan.”

  It was during Gupta’s time as managing director that McKinsey opened its groundbreaking “Knowledge Center” in a suburb of New Delhi, hiring a fleet of Indian researchers, many with MBAs, to analyze important trends such as cellular phone penetration for McKinsey consultants.

  When the McKinsey Knowledge Center turned out to be a huge hit, Gupta went global with the idea. He preached the sermon of offshoring to American companies eager to cut costs and pushed them to send more and more of their back-office and support work—corporate research, legal transcription, and financial analysis—to India. Clients were thrilled, and in India, Gupta was a corporate rock star, just as recognizable in Mumbai as Jamie Dimon is in New York.

  It was no small irony, then, that one of his dinner companions at the White House that evening was labor leader Andy Stern, the president of the country’s second-largest union (the Service Employees International Union). Stern, whose organization spent the most money supporting Obama, sat between Gupta and his wife, Anita, at a table sumptuously decorated with gold charger plates and purple and magenta arrangements of roses, sweet peas, and hydrangeas on green-apple tablecloths. Over a dinner of green curry prawns, collard greens, and coconut-aged basmati rice, Stern took the opportunity to nudge a key party some consider responsible for the fading prospects of the American worker. He pressed Gupta on why companies like Goldman, whose investors include public pension plans, didn’t have more regard for the worker. In his soft-spoken but firm way, Gupta insisted they did. They gave a lot of money away to needy organizations. But Stern had something more radical in mind—profits more broadly distributed to rank-and-file employees.